[ad_1]
According to archaeologists, ancient cut marks on mammoth bones unearthed on a remote island in the frozen ends of Siberia are the most northerly evidence of Paleolithic humans ever found.
The bones of woolly mammoth skeleton, dated to about 26,000 years ago, were excavated this summer by a Russian expedition to the island of Kotelny, in the far northeast of Siberia, 615 miles (990 kilometers) north of the polar Circle.
The team reconstructed more than two-thirds of the skeleton – and they found cut marks and notches, made by stone or bone tools, on almost all of the bones. This indicates that the animal was deliberately slaughtered, likely after being tracked down by a nomadic group of Stone Age hunters, archaeologists said.
Related: Return to the Stone Age: 17 Key Stages of Paleolithic Life
It is the most northerly evidence of Paleolithic humans ever found, said expedition leader Alexander Kandyba, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“This suggests that the northern frontier of human existence in the Pleistocene was far north of generally accepted ideas,” Kandyba told Live Science in an email, referring to the Pleistocene period between 2.6 million and 11,700 years ago – the time of the last ice age.
Until now, the northernmost traces of Stone Age humans have come from the Yana River Valley in the Yakutia region of Siberia and date from 27,000 to 29,000 years ago, a- he declared.
“The discovery of this site makes it possible to move the northern border of the existence of ancient man and the development of the territory by him in the Pleistocene of nearly 600 kilometers [370 miles] north, ”he said.
Mammoth bone
Kotelny Island is the largest of the New Siberian Islands, located between the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea, about 250 km off the northern coast of eastern Siberia.
By the time the mammoth was killed, the sea level was lower, and the island of Kotelny was therefore reattached to the mainland. The climate was also milder, although temperatures were still near or below freezing for most of the year.
Related: Resurrection of the Mammoth: 11 obstacles to bringing back an Ice Age beast
Archaeologists have already found the fossilized remains of trees on the island, but it is too cold for them to grow there today. The Kandyba team discovered the mammoth bones on Kotelny Island in 2019, but it wasn’t until the expedition in July this year that they could be fully excavated, he said. declared.
Stone Age Hunters
The team did not find any of the tools that caused the marks, but they did find a large number of ivory shavings and shavings that indicated ancient people had carved into mammoth tusks. They also found two ivory tools made from the tusks: a small spatula and a strange object that looks a bit like a squeegee; archaeologists are still trying to determine what it was used for, Kandyba said.
From the bones, archaeologists have gleaned other clues about the way of life of the hunters of the Stone Age. For starters, it seems clear that they hunted mammoths, although other archaeologists have suggested that Paleolithic hunters may have avoided such large and dangerous prey in favor of smaller animals, like reindeer. “I think people were hunting all kinds of animals back then,” Kandyba said.
There was no sign that the mammoth was trapped before it was killed – a method some archaeologists suggest these hunters may have used.
“The fact that the mammoth’s skeleton was located on the slope of an old terrace suggests that the animal was indeed killed in the open air, and not in a mud trap,” he said.
The results of the latest research on the mammoth skeleton and evidence that it was slaughtered by Stone Age humans are being prepared for publication in a scientific journal, Kandyba said.
Originally posted on Live Science.
[ad_2]
Source link